Anxious thoughts today.
We've all focused for months on wedding preparation. KT has led the charge, and many of us have helped. Having the event and guests in Spokane brings pros and cons, mostly pros. Today, I felt tired from all the prep and work. Tomorrow will be better.
I realized I'm trying to help coordinate all the details for the wedding, clean the house and also clean up the backyard. I've been working for months to clear the back yard to make it ready for the weekend. That included finishing the garage, clearing both the back border and side garden patch, move logs and wood, on and on. I sold the rug, bought a new one, planted a new garden. Yeah, I'm worn out.
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I felt afraid today. I don't know where my faith is moving to. I was anxious and all I wanted to do was meditate. I don't know what prayer is supposed to do in situations like that. I realized that praying when I'm anxious, I don't know that that has ever calmed me down. Not the way I was taught to pray at least.
Christ is more personal, Jesus is more personal, but how does that work, really? It seems what I'm struggling with is giving myself permission to be strong, to figure things out on my own.
Jesus was presented as a cure-all for every ill that comes my way. I can't imagine my life without the foundation of belief in a Creator/God and for the radical love that the life of Christ expressed. That's not what I'm talking about. I feel like somehow, I need to grow up, learn to be strong, to continue doing what I've been doing, which is to think for myself while knowing I'm part of a created world based on scientific laws and events.
I also can't imagine my life without medical science and the help I've received. How much of the good I've received has come from people who felt prompted to serve others? How much of that was driven by love of God, the feeling of God's love in them?
I don't want to lose my faith, but I think what I am questioning or losing isn't really faith; it's some kind of religious certainty that shuts off your brain. Yeah, that's it. Trust in Jesus and things will be better.
Growing up with a mentally-ill parent, the victim sexual abuse, I came out of childhood with a different view of prayer than maybe was intended. I don't have a clue how many prayers I said for my father, that he would be healed. He wasn't. He grew worse, ultimately going in and out of psych wards, nursing homes and back to their house, all under my Mom's care. It was hideous, tortuous, and I prayed the whole time.
I think back to the article I read in the Sun magazine by an atheist Muslim (yes, they have those). He's a cultural Muslim who doesn't believe in God or Allah. His most profound moment was as a little child, watching his cousin die and the prayers of people around that implied somehow this was better or that God had to take this child.
What the child died of is now a disease that can be almost completely cured by medicine, not God.
I believe God intends for us to be an active part of removing suffering. I think at least that's what the Jesus story is getting at, and that has been almost completely missed.
Maybe for this season of life at least, I am more interested in understanding myself than understanding God. They seem the same, in some ways. Thomas Keating wrote: "God and my True Self are not separate. Though I am not God, God and my True Self are the same thing."
For decades and decades, I didn't know myself. I find that terrifying now, at 52, that I need to be more close to myself, my strengths, hopefully, my renewed energy, so I can pursue something that can bring me joy and a greater sense of happiness than my more solitary, less creative life is doing now. Yes, that feels terrifying, like the stakes are high.
I've had enough experiences with God and the divine to know God is there and is personal. I don't have to wonder about that. I wonder what is next.
I am slowly learning to not have the rose-colored glasses about the past and the future that I once had, to enjoy the present. Oddly, it becomes the past that then I fawn over, not enjoying it or even understanding it at the time.
Now's the time I would love to better understand God, to hear from God, to especially have discernment. How can I in anyway see what's best for my future if I don't know myself or know the divine being I believe loves me...?
I'm not starting from zero on all of these, not at all.
But all of it, it gives me pause.